Pitfall! creator David Crane named videogame pioneer

Besides incorporating myriad innovative techniques, Crane's masterpiece Pitfall! is widely considered to be the origin of the run-and-jump "platform" game genre. With more than 4 million copies sold, it is second in sales only to Atari's version of Pac-Man.

"All platformers owe a debt to Pitfall!," said WayForward's Velasco, who notes that Crane's game incorporated most of what would become the key components of the genre -- collecting treasures, timing tricky jumps, escaping enemies.

Crane left Activision in 1986 to join Absolute Entertainment, the first North American third-party Nintendo publisher. There, he created the hit game A Boy and His Blob, an open-ended game with a charming premise: By feeding your blob jellybeans, you could get him to transform into a variety of objects that helped you solve puzzles.

It was a difficult game with some frustrating design quirks, but what most people don't realize is that Crane created it under intense deadline pressure: He had only six weeks to finish it. Crane rented what he calls a "flop house" one block from the office, then worked 16-hour days with no breaks.

For the last two weeks of development, he worked 20-hour days and barely slept, then flew to the Consumer Electronics Show to do trade demos all day, retiring to his hotel room every night to fix bugs.

"A Boy and His Blob had rough implementations and was sorta confusing, but tossing jellybeans and transforming your gelatinous buddy was really fresh and fun," recalls Velasco. The game's combination of artificial intelligence, open world and nonviolent puzzle gameplay were far ahead of their time, said Velasco, who directed the 2009 Wii remake of Crane's A Boy and His Blob.

As with his Activision games, Crane's name was featured on the cover and title screen of the original Blob. But the era of a single person creating an entire game from soup to nuts was coming to a close. Crane led small teams at Absolute, developing hit games like Amazing Tennis and The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants.

Today, Crane and fellow Activision alum Garry Kitchen run Skyworks, applying their knowledge of classic game creation to browser-based advergames and iPhone apps. In February, Skyworks will release the first volume of "David Crane's Technical Wizardry," a series of apps that explain early game technology with interactive diagrams.

Crane is hoping to educate iPhone users about the good old days, before game-design courses popped up at top universities, when hit games came from a single person's intuition.

"Somehow, we knew how to make a game that people would love to play," he said.